The chilling note that Atlanta mass murderer Mark Barton left alongside the bloodied bodies of his wife and two kids shows he was a desperate man who saw no other way out, top shrinks said yesterday.

Barton wrote that he killed his wife and his children from a previous marriage to spare them a life of financial pain he blamed on other brokers.

“He was truly a sick person who believed that the only way to end his suffering was to kill those he blamed for destroying his life,” said Dr. Bob Heckel, professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

“And in his distorted and psychotically depressed view, he was convinced that killing his family was for the best,” Heckel said.

“He thought that he would be freeing them of any pain – and that they would all be reunited in Heaven. He was convinced that God approved of it.”

In his eerie murder letter, the 44-year-old chemist-turned-day trader said he “killed the children to exchange them for five minutes of pain for a lifetime of pain.

“I forced myself to do it to keep them from suffering later.”

Dr. Kenneth Manges, a forensic psychologist in Cincinnati, said Barton could no longer differentiate between reality and fantasy – but desperately wanted to end his life dramatically.

“He knew the only way to end his suffering was to kill himself, but not before he killed a whole lot of other people,” he said.

“In his delusional way, he thought he was justified in murdering these brokers because they had lost his money,” Manges said.

“But in truth, nobody told him to trade. It was his doing,” he added.

Dr. Reid Melloy, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California in Santa Barbara, said that murderers like Barton – who was the prime suspect in the 1993 slayings of his first wife and her mother- are natural-born killers.

“His problems in the stock market and at home with his wife may have had a precipitated effect,” he said. “But the likely reason for this act was that he had a predisposition to commit mass murders.”